Spy Answers Asks - Tumblr Posts
spyglass i think ur cool but the Crundle's creator god is probably gonna show up in my nightmares
:)
okay but actually, Tarsweh is pretty harmless. he just sits in the sky and stares. (and occasionally picks his holy nose.)
okay but spy is the swampgrass cannonical in crundle
if you mean the Grass Mouth gag, then you bet your tattooed cello it fucking is.
Hey. I saw your reblog of that post saying something about your favorite Youtuber uploading a history of the human race with the last minutes dedicated to a possible message being sent into space? “We’re the last humans left”. Do you still remember which video that was? I’d like to watch it.
it’s linked in the post! the red underlined text, which is also the title of the video: We’re The Last Humans Left. the YouTuber in question is exurb1a, who makes fantastic and thought-provoking video essays about the intersections of philosophy and science. my favorite vid of his is and then we’ll be okay, a neofable about acceptance.
King, please explain the gay immortal cyborg warlordfrom the future?????????
Ah, that would be one Pelinal Fucking Whitestrake. Possible avatar of a dead trickster god (Shezarr/Shor/Lorkhan), said to be able to speak directly to Akatosh (whom he hated). His heart was the Amulet of Kings, and his right arm was “made of a killing light.” Knew about Reman Cyrodiil a thousand years too early. Et fucking cetera.
Just.... look him up on the wiki. His entire page is a trip. Alternatively, FudgeMuppet did a video about him on YouTube, link here.
Hamburger child swap
this has been sitting in my inbox for I don’t even know how long. Anon, if you’re still watching, what the FUCK does this mean
What is the most underrated object in the solar system in you opinion? Similarly; what’s overrated?
Hoo, that's a really tough question for me to answer!
My default answer would probably be Deimos, just bc of its potential usefulness (thanks Atomic Rockets for teaching me about that!) but tbqh... I think Triton is really underrated! The Neptunian satellite system is fascinating to me, and Triton in particular (although I maintain that it should have been named Salacia). It's literally a captured dwarf planet, and one of the densest KBO-adjacents out there. It has rainbow ice sheets and nitrogen geysers and it orbits retrograde, how can you not be fascinated by it? Its geological/cosmic history is so interesting, particularly its effects on the rest of Neptune's satellites. Proteus is visible proof that the capture of Triton destroyed the original moons of Neptune, and it's quite possible there were several objects similar in size to the Uranian or Saturnian moons beforehand that we'll never get to know. Idk, the ice giants and their satellites in general deserve more love, and Triton in particular definitely merits further study via probe.
Honestly, I think Mars is kinda overrated? Don't get me wrong: I love Mars, it's very interesting and will undoubtedly be our next great leap (not to mention it has plenty of potential as SF fodder). But I think there's a bit TOO much public focus on Mars, and not enough on the other interesting bodies of the system (like the ice giants!)
How often do you dream about Tumblr?
Almost never, in fact. At least, as far as I remember, since most of my dreams just evaporate within an hour of waking. My dreams are incredibly bizarre and vivid, and usually make no sense in the light of day, but this one was a rare gem that not only cohered but was extremely funny
How can I gaslight my parents into thinking I’m a stripper? I mean how can I instill just a hint of the possibility into their minds I miiiigt be one? Like not enough for them to ask about it, but enough for them to question it and wonder if they’re reading into things or not? I’m a young lady who still loves with them. I have a good job, have never gotten a speeding ticket, kissed someone, or really often into any trouble, but that’s boring. I need to spice stuff up
........ ma'am I am a worldbuilder?
no for real I need you to understand how I experienced this
How can I gaslight my parents into thinking I’m a stripper? I mean how can I instill just a hint of the possibility into their minds I miiiigt be one? Like not enough for them to ask about it, but enough for them to question it and wonder if they’re reading into things or not? I’m a young lady who still loves with them. I have a good job, have never gotten a speeding ticket, kissed someone, or really often into any trouble, but that’s boring. I need to spice stuff up
........ ma'am I am a worldbuilder?
how hard is it to be a world builder? do you like... build them one brick at a time? Does it take you seven days too? Are you God? Or is it more like... like minecraft? Are you minecraft?
For me, it comes as easily as breathing. I'm a worldbuilder by nature: I love learning about how the real world works, turning the pieces of it over in my mind, and putting them together in new configurations. In that sense it's very much like building with bricks, though more the Lego kind than clay. Not only that, but I have strong escapist tendencies –what better refuge, then, than a haven I've built myself? I don't consider myself a god to these worlds –many are canonically godless– but I do have a sort of parental fondness for them. After all, I've put several years of my life into each of them.
So in that sense, it's not very hard for me! But that's just me. For some people it doesn't come as naturally, but that's okay! That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, if you want to. Worldbuilding, storytelling... these arts are an inherent facet of human expression, rooted deeply in our ancestral desire to wander and explore. Even if you struggle with it, it's worthwhile, because you are making something that is uniquely yours, and that matters. And don't forget: there's no right or wrong way to worldbuild. Your process of creation is as unique as the art that results!
And no, I'm not Minecraft, but I do adore Minecraft for all of the above reasons!!!
hey, so I saw on your bullet hole post you commenting on how difficult the amount of notifications was making things- you can stop notifications from one post specifically without it affecting any others! If you go into the three dots at the upper right corner, there’s an option to turn off notifications for that post specifically!
Sorry if you already know this and I’m being annoying, but I just thought I’d offer the help in case you needed it
I appreciate the tip, anon, but unfortunately that only mutes push notifications, not my tumblr notifications (at least on mobile). I don't get push notifs for tumblr in the first place, so all it does for me is give me the option to UNmute them and oh tor no thank you—
so happy you made the glock post.. because now i’ve found a cool lil writing acc to follow and enjoy!!
Thank you so much!!! I'm very grateful for the literal hundreds of followers I've gotten in the past week, but it's especially nice when folks actively engage with my work (and with me, hehe, I wanna make more friends!) I hope you do enjoy it, I've got plenty of stuff already up and even more in the pipeline. :)
Today’s your birthday? Well, congrats! You share a birthday with Richie Kotzen!
I don't know who that is but thank you!! :3
Edit: apparently he's a metal guitarist, that's pretty sweet!
happy birthday hon!! I love you!!
here’s a birthday ask! 💌
how are birthdays celebrated in some cultures of your worlds? any worlds, any cultures within— just whichever ones you’d like to talk about! I love to hear about the cool celebrations you come up with; I’d love to hear about how different people celebrate getting older, if you’d like to talk about it :3
THANK YOU HON! I LOVE YOU TOO!!! 💚
This is a GOOD question, and one that I don't readily have an answer to! I'll do the thing that worldbuilders do best: improvise an answer on the spot and overthink it later.
[ASP] Birthdays (or hatchdays, if you're a species which emerges from an egg/cocoon) are still a common event planetside, particularly in human cultures! But for spacers it's less meaningful –between time dilation and the wildly different year lengths of various worlds, it gets hard to keep track of. Sure, you can track it by metric time (using the rounded Earth year), but when most of your life is spent in space without the seasonal cycle of a planet, you tend to perceive time as a more continuous thing, or at least segmented in a different way.
[SPH] Birthdays are a big deal to some cultures, but utterly mundane to others. The Orniikh people treat the day with great reverence and joy: it's the anniversary of the day their principal deities chose to incarnate as you! Orniikh people generally spend their birthdays invoking jeha –that is to say, having a lot of fun!
For Aurians, particularly those of the Temoran belief system, one's birthday is a time for gratitude towards the elder spirits and one's community. You were brought into the world by the grace of the spirits, and it is with the help of your community that you have lived through another season cycle.
The dwarves, meanwhile, hail from the depths of the Southern Range, sheltered from the sky and the seasons, and thus don't really have a cultural concept of cyclical time. For them, age is a continuously progressing status rather than a number, and life stages ("youth," "adult," "elder") are gradually transitioned through rather than marked with fixed dates.
What about Sagan 4 Alpha? It;s the oldest collaborative spec evo project still running, and it was the first true "evo game".
SHIT I FORGOT ABOUT SAGAN 4!!! I'm gonna edit my post to include that ASAP holy fuck, thank you for reminding me anon!!
hey there! I got here via your dream post and stuck around to read your writing. The “realistic” sci fi worldbuilding is very cool - especially detailed explanations of how tech like FTL travel works! Have you considered running a homebrew campaign, or partnering with someone who writes character/plot driven fiction? I find that tends to generate a larger audience. Your character first-person writing has some interesting ideas! Quick tip - the overuse of commas chops up sentence flow and makes prose more difficult to read. Try editing to remove some!
Hey anon, I appreciate the ask and the compliments very much! Thanks for joining me here in my little corner of the web! I'm really glad you like my work; that makes me very happy to hear because I pour a lot of time and love into it!
...Buuut you've sort of hit a nerve here so I hope you're prepared for an essay response! I'm sorry in advance for how long this turned out to be and I hope this doesn't drive you off, eheh. Again, I do genuinely appreciate the feedback.
See, my default method of storytelling is speculative fiction: a concept or set of concepts is the center of the work, and almost all my characters are just cogs in the story machine. Sure, I have some characters I’m attached to, but the vast majority are just there because they have to be. They’re not the point of the story. Characters ARE important, but they rank lower to me than worldbuilding. When I generate story ideas, the characters are just temporary vehicles for the audience to connect with a concept I’m presenting.
And with that, we come to the problem that you've brought up which kicks me right in the ass every time: people always latch onto the characters, and don't give half as much of a damn about the setting. Yeah, I'm sensitive about that! Because I fall in love with technical details like planetary system structure and the mechanics of warp drives in much the same way as everyone else fixates on their "blorbos." That's why, when it comes to original work, you'll pretty much only find worldbuilding and writing posts on the blog –not to say I don't ever post anything about my OCs, but I can write whole essays about setting details and none of my OCs have that same depth.
And, anon? I'd like you to imagine how alienating that feels. I can't help but be upset when all of my friends are having fun making character playlists and talking about shipping while I'm sitting over in my corner with a twenty-page spreadsheet detailing the statistics of hundreds of stars and planets that nobody wants to read, because it's boring to everyone but me! I have tried to get involved, making characters for the hell of it to play in the same space as my friends. I wanna be excited about them, but they just don't hold my interest nearly as much. I can't change this, and it kinda fucking sucks sometimes!!!
Yes, sure, I could absolutely partner with someone who's better at characters and character-centric plot than I am! That's a good and practical suggestion! But you know what would happen? People would latch onto those characters and pay them much more attention than the setting they stem from, and I honestly don't think I could cope with that. I've tried this too, actually; I'm the one doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to the Midnight Sea lore. I love getting into the gullyworks, tinkering around and fitting all the pieces together, making the world tick like a well-constructed mechanism. I know my friends like that about me too! That feels good! I just wish I got more credit/attention for that in itself, rather than for what it enables. I'm the minority when it comes to fictional focus, and I just have to live with that.
Also, yes, I'm aware I have a tendency to use lots of commas. I'm very sorry it hinders you, but it actually helps me when I read things back and when I'm organizing my thoughts. I'm sorry but that's a stylistic choice I don't think I can shake, but I'll try to be mindful of my comma usage going forward. ^~^;
Let me reiterate just one more time that I genuinely appreciate your ask, and I hope you stick around! I'm glad you're here! I'm sorry this got a little venty and I hope this doesn't come off as defensive or rude. It's just that this is something I feel strongly about and I wanted to take the opportunity to be honest about one of my biggest and most persistent struggles.
I saw your last ask, where you said that you have a spreadsheet on the statistics of hundreds of planets. Do you have any spreadsheets on material properties (ie. mechanical properties of fictional metals or woods)? Could I see them?
I actually don't, unfortunately! Materials science is one of my blind spots tbh; I don't know very much about it and thus don't feel confident tangling with the implications of fictional materials. At best, there are certain substances in use in the Diaspora canon (such as room temperature superconductors and high-durability heat shielding) which I've given general properties, but their composition and specifics are intentionally left vague. However, Atomic Rockets has a cool section on the Unobtainium page all about different kinds of high-tech metamaterials!
38 for Tex for OC asks!
What memory do they revisit the most often?
Oh boy. Well, I think he has two of about equal weight.
The first one is a formative childhood memory. It's 1990, and six-year-old Leon Walker watches in awe as the Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off the pad at Galveston Spaceport like a massive white dragon leaping into the sky. The world is consumed by the unspeakable force of the rocket. It becomes the only thing he can see, hear, feel in his chest like the stirring of his own soul. The big screens show the laughing faces of the shuttle crew, the Terran contingent of the Trident 1 expedition on their way to Jupiter, filled with excitement as they ride the world's most powerful explosion into orbit. In this moment he knows exactly what he wants to be when he grows up. He wants to go.
Flash forward. It's 2007. The war with the invading aliens has been over for one year, and 23-year-old "Tex" Walker is finally home safe on Earth, lying in a field with his childhood sweetheart at midnight, watching the night sky. A shuttle starts its ascent from the spaceport, miles away, just a dot on a trail of light. But the power of it still thrums through the air and the ground, and as Tex looks into the adoring eyes of his beloved, he focuses instead on the reflection of the stars he finds there. In this moment he knows exactly what he's become now that he's grown up. He can no longer stay.
have you seen South Scrimshaw?
Hadn't even heard of it before your ask but it looks pretty cool! I love grounded-yet-whimsical parallel-biosphere stuff like this; reminds me of the old Morae River Project a bit! Gonna have to check it out soon, thanks for the rec!